2 Imprisoned US Journalists in Diplomatic Limbo in North Korea

Two TV journalists from the Internet network Current TV, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, have become the story they themselves were trying to cover.

Both of them, along with two other members of their crew who were able to avoid capture, were detained after they all crossed the Chinese border with North Korea in March.

The arrests took place while the TV crew was filming a story about North Korean defectors, but their curiosity was stronger than their common sense and ended up in a Pyongyang prison. Ever since, their network, a creation of former US Vice President Al Gore, has been lobbying the US State Department to negotiate their release.

Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that both Lee, Ling and another journalist from South Korea have become the peons in a diplomatic tug of war involving North Korea's desperate attempts to get attention from the West, starting with the apparent recovery of dictator Kim Jong Ill from his health problems in October.

WSJ:

Since then, North Korea has launched a missile, pulled out of six-nation aid-for-disarmament talks, kicked out international weapons inspectors and said it may again test a nuclear weapon, something it first did in 2006.

North Korea's treatment of the three detainees violates international human-rights practices, but news coverage of their situation has been overshadowed by the diplomatic fallout from Pyongyang's April 5 missile launch.

Under international criminal law, defendants have the right to access diplomatic officers of their own state. But American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling, detained for nearly two months, haven't been allowed contact with Western officials since March 30. A South Korean man known only by his surname, Yu, also has been kept from any contact with officials from his country, according to the South's Unification Ministry.

The North said on April 24 that it would put the two women on trial for "hostile acts," in what would be its first trial of Americans, but it didn't say when. It has given no details to the U.S. or to Sweden, which has diplomatic relations with North Korea and provides services to U.S. citizens in the country.

Lee and Ling face charges of illegal entry and the much more severe “hostility toward the North Korean people.” Both charges carry a maximum combined sentence of 13 years in prison.

Comments

[latimeri]

There is no limit for the young women’s' curiosity. They put their noses everywhere, what sense was this; going to sniffing and snooping on the not Korea border seeking some reason to get up a sensation. The situation there is danger enough and it not need anymore provocation.
American must keep out of the region close by the North Korea. Illegal enter or crossing the border of any country who hold up visa - have been always illegal act and have been sentenced even in the home country of thy own.